P&A On Display at SEA-TAC Airport
I started working with Explore Edmonds (formerly Visit Edmonds) around this time last year. This “new” client was a natural progression of my work with the Edmonds Downtown Alliance (Ed!). And, because of those relationships, P&A is now on display—*Melissa Gorga singing voice* on display, on display—at SEA-TAC Airport!
More on that in a minute.
But, First, A Little Client History
While Explore was technically a new client for me, my point of contact is the same. Net: It pays to do good work for clients you respect and who value your partnership. You never know what rooms they’ll be in saying your name.
As the name suggests, the downtown alliance focuses on Edmonds’s Business Improvement District (BID) and the shops and service providers who operate within it. Each business is assessed dues that are used for things like signage, the holiday trolley, and me. I write the featured articles for Ed! You can see them here.
One of the parameters of my articles for Ed! is I write only about downtown businesses, and only about businesses that are current on their dues. While there are plenty of places I get to fangirl in the pieces we publish, there are also a ton of awesome businesses outside of the BID’s borders.
Working with Explore Edmonds
When the opportunity to expand my work on behalf of Edmonds was presented, I jumped at the opportunity to write about businesses all over the city. The food! The wine! The pizza! The beauty destinations! The art! The roundups of all of the above and more!
And because what we do with Explore is focused more on attracting tourists than on impressing locals (although we have plenty of locals who like to *provide feedback* on my articles—I get it. I’m proud to live here, too!), my scope for Explore Edmonds includes writing a few ads.
Destination Tourism Marketing
In 2023, as Visit Edmonds rebranded to Explore Edmonds, I got to write our new taglines and headlines. This work was in addition to my retainer scope of 1-3 featured articles per month. If you’re a long-winded person like I am, you may understand that I was stressed about the assignment. It’s hard to be brief, at least for me.
Becoming an early adopter of Twitter (RIP) in 2010 helped me figure out how to be more concise, but to write something short and perfect that says everything without saying too much is capital S stressful.
I spent weeks poring over magazines and building a sticky note wall with options. I took more time than I usually do to come up with something I loved and was excited to present, but was also not over-thought, over-wrought, or over-written. Not an easy task!
In the end, I came up with the headline “Dive into the magic of Edmonds,” with the option of timely or more niche-specific taglines that can be swapped in to support it.
When my clients came to me this year to write an ad for the Port of Seattle aka SEA-TAC airport, I was like Holy shit, okay!
We had a few meetings and brainstorming sessions about it. Here are some of my notes from those conversations:
Vibrant
Beaches. Shopping. Art. Food.
Coastal
Seaside
Authenticity—how do we show this?
Look up words to describe New England
Your Instagram grid will thank you
We’re what you think about when you think about the Pacific Northwest
Explore the best of Northwest arts, culture, shopping, food, and outdoors—just 17 miles from Seattle
This is usually what my notes look like. They can be pretty non-sensical, but what they end up doing is creating little sticking points in my brain. I get my subconscious working out the puzzle of how to put the words together and usually have a pretty solid idea of what I want to present within a few days. Whether I’m willing to present those ideas (depending on my deadline) is another story entirely.
Look for Me in Concourse D
Here’s a look at our final ad:
We knew we could show some of the things we wanted to communicate with imagery, so I didn’t need to include a long list of things in the headline and tagline.
I took “from” and upgraded to “north of” so people walking past the big digital billboard would have a sense of place, even if they’d never been to Seattle or Edmonds before. And I thought a lot about what makes Edmonds so special. I know for me, it’s the access to everything I loved living in the Emerald City, but with easier parking, a tighter sense of community, and a whole lot of cute.
Another subtle change we made from previous ads (we have ongoing print ads in WELCOME Magazine and 425 Magazine) is instead of saying “Perfectly PNW” for locals who who what that means, we spelled out “Pacific Northwest” to make the phrase “Perfectly Pacific Northwest and closer than you think,” since many people operate under the misconception that Edmonds is far from Seattle. Depending on traffic and where you’re coming from, it’s usually not that bad.
Plus, we could make it from my house in south Edmonds to First Hill in Seattle during commuting hour for me to give birth to our second child without that birth happening in my husband’s M5, then Edmonds really isn’t far from Seattle at all. My water broke in the parking garage, for what it’s worth. Our daughter is almost five and we’re all thriving.
I digress!
Book a flight soon and make sure it comes into the D gates (trust—this is much better than N or S, IYKYK), snap a selfie, and tag me (@whitpopa) and Explore (@exploreedmondswa) in it.
Because I’m on display (on display), and I may have to attempt to find it myself. As my grandma told me in seventh grade when I ran for student government for the first time and felt bad for my opponent and voted for him (still won, but you feel me): “Why should anyone vote for you if you don’t vote for you?”
See you at SEA-TAC.